Paralyzed ex-athlete's foundation helping others

By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press

Sunday, March 31, 2013

CLAREMONT, Calif. (AP) — The irony is never lost on Hal Hargrave Jr. that it was handicapped-accessible bathroom doors he was delivering to Las Vegas when he lost control of his truck on a desert highway and flipped it four times, a crash that paralyzed him from the neck down.

If it was a sign to the strapping 17-year-old athlete, who once routinely benched 300 pounds, that his life was headed off in the wrong direction, it was a harsh one.

Still, that’s pretty much how Hargrave sees it these days as he runs an organization that in just four years has raised $1.2 million to provide wheelchairs, remodel homes and subsidize the costs of rehabilitation therapy for more than 100 paralyzed people.

When he’s not fundraising for the nonprofit Be Perfect foundation, the former high school athlete, who had planned to study business and play baseball in college, is still working out 15 to 20 hours a week. He even goes to the same fitness center he frequented as a high school baseball player. Only this time he heads to a new, 3,000-square foot wing that he persuaded the gym’s president to add to benefit dozens of other spinal cord injury victims.

In the 5 1/2 years since his accident, the friendly, outgoing Hargrave has gone from the big likable kid everyone around here seemed to know to one of this tight-knit community’s true folk heroes. The teenager who used to take his wakeboard to the beach to do backflips now enjoys rolling around town in his wheelchair, helping others.

“Here’s a 17-year-old boy who had a debilitating, life-changing accident,” said Mike Alpert, president of the Claremont Club where Hargrave works out. “So many people that go through that would give up. Would be depressed. Would blame everybody else. Here’s a young man who just said, `I have a calling to change the world and to help people through what’s happening to me. And then he goes out and does it! How special is that?”

Not that he works 24-7 on the foundation. Hargrave, 23, is also a full-time student at the nearby University of La Verne, where he maintains a near-perfect 3.8 grade point average.

“Don’t you just love him?” said the university’s president, Devorah Lieberman. “He’s an amazing young man.”

None of this, the foundation, the section of the Claremont Club that Hargrave helped persuade the San Diego-based spinal cord recovery center Project Walk to place its first-ever franchise in, not even the La Verne education, would have happened, Hargrave says, if he hadn’t swerved his truck to avoid debris in the road on that July day in 2007.

He had initially turned down an academic scholarship to La Verne to attend California State University, Long Beach, where he figured he’d have a better shot at a college baseball career while studying business administration. By now, he figured, he’d have his degree and be ready to move up in the family business, Apex Imaging. He’d been working for the company that summer, helping remodel a Las Vegas restaurant.

Still, in the back of his mind, Hargrave kept thinking he wanted something a little more challenging out of life.

“I got it,” he says with a smile over lunch at the Claremont Club’s cafe. “I understood at that point that this was intended to happen, for whatever reason.”

Not that the epiphany came immediately. First he had to fight just to stay alive.

“It was very touch and go the first two weeks,” his father, Hal Hargrave Sr., recalled. “They had him on breathing machines. He got pneumonia. ... We didn’t know if he was going to stay with us or not.”

It was during those days that Alpert looked him up in the hospital, as did scores of other people in this town of 35,000 nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, 30 miles east of Los Angeles.

When he got out of the hospital, Alpert suggested, Hargrave should return to the club, where he had many friends.

He was splitting his time between there and Project Walk in the San Diego area when he became friends with Brian O’Neill, an electrician who had suffered a similar injury in a dirt bike crash. One day, as the two said goodbye, O’Neill told his friend he wouldn’t see him again. He’d lost his job and house and couldn’t afford the rehab sessions.

The idea of a foundation to help people like O’Neill was born then and there, Hargrave says. Soon he had moved O’Neill to the Claremont Club and was creating Be Perfect.

At the foundation’s first fundraising dinner in 2009, he expected to raise maybe $30,000. When $250,000 came in, he recalls thinking “maybe this is going to be bigger than I ever expected.”

As things took off, he asked Alpert if he could start bringing more disabled people to Claremont to work out with him.

Alpert, who said sure, soon realized he had no space to provide the specialized care they needed.

“To make a long story short, I basically lied to my board of directors and said I needed a second Pilates studio,” he recalls with a laugh. “Since then I’ve told my board the truth, and they didn’t fire me. So here we are.”

The new Project Walk studio, which opened last month, includes two dozen members who use its state-of-the-art equipment, including an $80,000 gait trainer that helps a paralyzed person simulate walking. When he’s not busy working out there, Hargrave is recruiting, saying the facility can accommodate dozens more.

When he was injured, doctors gave Hargrave only a 1 to 3 percent chance of walking again.

Since then, he’s regained the use of his arms and is able to extend his legs. His fingers haven’t recovered enough for him to shake hands (he has to fist bump), but he can manipulate an iPad well enough to take notes in class. When he was ready to return to school but wanted to be closer to home, to his surprise La Verne simply reoffered him his scholarship. He hopes to eventually become a sports broadcaster.

Another goal is to eventually walk again, no matter how far off in the future that might be. However that goes, Hargrave says he couldn’t be happier with the turn his life has taken. He hopes to eventually build an endowment that will allow the Be Perfect Foundation to be helping others long after he’s gone.

“I had dreams of going off and going to school and becoming a baseball player and doing this and that,” he says. “But when I think back on it, it was so selfish. And now my dreams are much different. My dreams are to keep people in therapy and my dreams are to help other people. That’s what my life is about at this point and I understand that and it’s something I’m passionate about and it’s something I want to do forever.”